Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte - Volume 108, Issue 1, 2016

Suspension of Judgment

What does it take to suspend one’s judgment? In this introduction to the special issue ‘Scepticism and the suspension of judgment’, I present a conceptual analysis of suspension of judgment (what it is, what it isn’t, and why we might want to do it). Basically I argue that suspension is a mental attitude of neutrality. If you suspend judgment on a certain proposition, you are neutral towards its truth. In addition, I make a few suggestions on how to further analyse this attitude of neutrality, and distinguish it from other attitudes such as doubt and inquisitiveness.

Freedom Through Skepticism

In this paper, I consider a form of skepticism that has a permissive conclusion, according to which we are rationally permitted to suspend judgment in an area, or to have beliefs in that area. I argue that such a form of skepticism is resistant to some traditional strategies of refutation. It also carries a benefit, namely that it increases voluntary control over doxastic states by introducing options, and therefore greater freedom, into the realm of belief. I argue that intellectual preferences and dispositions provide decisive reasons that can settle our doxastic states in such cases.

Suspension and Disagreement

Some sceptics claim that in cases of peer disagreement, we ought to suspend judgment about the topic of discussion. In this paper, we argue that the sceptic’s conclusions are only correct in some scenarios. We show that the sceptic’s conclusion is built on two premises (the principle of evidential symmetry and the principle of evidentialism) and argue that both premises are incorrect. First, we show that although it is often rational to suspend judgment when an epistemic peer disagrees with you, peer disagreements are not symmetrical. Next, we argue that even if one assumes that peer disagreements are symmetrical, it might still be rational to stick to one’s guns in the light of peer disagreement.

The Triple Life of Ancient Thought Experiments

There is no ancient Greek term corresponding to what we nowadays refer to as a thought experiment, and presumably ancient philosophers did not have our modern notion of a thought experiment. But there is no doubt that they did use thought experiments. In fact, they often employed them in ways similar to those of contemporary philosophers, that is, both for defending their own theories as well as for refuting the theories of their opponents. What seems to be particularly intriguing, though, is a third way in which thought experiments were used in antiquity, and particularly in Hellenistic philosophy, namely in order to induce suspension of judgement. For the ancient Sceptics, who wanted to avoid being saddled with dogmatic opinions, made abundant use of thought experiments, not in order to settle philosophical controversies, but in order to formulate arguments of the same strength in support of contradictory beliefs. Indeed, in some cases the hypothetical scenario of one and the same thought experiment was evoked on both sides of a philosophical dispute. Thus, thought experiments were used by ancient philosophers: first, in order to support philosophical theories; second, in order to rebut philosophical theories; and third, in order to induce suspension of judgement. This is what I call the triple life of ancient thought experiments.

The Practical and Epistemic Value of Pyrrhonism

This paper assesses both the practical and the epistemic value of Pyrrhonism as this stance is described in Sextus Empiricus’s extant writings. It will first be explored whether the Pyrrhonist’s suspension of judgment and undisturbedness make us behave in a moral or immoral way, and whether they allow us to attain those goals that would make it possible to live well. It will then be examined whether the Pyrrhonist’s suspension of judgment makes it possible to reach the epistemic goals of attaining truth and avoiding error. It will finally be considered whether the results of the previous analyses show that Pyrrhonism is of no philosophical interest to a contemporary audience.

Overcoming the Suspension of Assent: The Academic Roots of Gassendi’s Probabilism

In this paper, I show that, beyond the role played by Pyrrhonian arguments in rebuking Aristotelian theses, Academic philosophy offered to Gassendi a probabilist model of knowledge which, contrary to the Pyrrhonian suspension of assent, opened the possibility of a natural philosophy conceived as a science of appearances. In addition to Gassendi’s erudite interest for Cicero and Charron, Academic probabilism suited Gassendi’s own practice as a natural philosopher in the realms of meteorology and astronomy. But first and foremost, Gassendi’s preference for Academic philosophy rather than for Pyrrhonism was motivated, early in his philosophical career, by ethical concerns immanent to his practice of savant: the importance of preserving his libertas philosophandi for his experimental approach to nature, combined with his personal incapacity not to incline toward one opinion or another, led him to formulate his epistemological probabilism and to claim the freedom to revise his opinions from day to day.